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stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may look back, and become a black stone like themselves.¹

45. Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong man must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears. He retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel, or sympathy from any one; and the spirit of defiance in which he was forced to labour led him sometimes into violences, from which the slightest expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy that was upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven, were both alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil effects of both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and others little more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public opinion.²

But all have this noble virtue-they are in everything his own: there are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.

46. I have spoken above³ of his gigantic memory: it is especially necessary to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of grasp which a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once brought within his reach-grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever.

On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable. Probably,

¹ [Here Ruskin, it seems, indulges in some little mystification; the reference being not to the Arabian Nights, but to his own fairy story, The King of the Golden River (see Vol. I.).]

² [Compare what Ruskin says above of Wordsworth’s Prefaces-“every other sentence stiffened into defiance,” § 17, p. 354.]

³ [§ 21, pp. 359, 360. Ruskin returned to the subject in Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. ii.; see especially § 18, where the passages in this pamphlet are referred to.]

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